On 8 March 2018, approximately five million – or one in five – working women in Spain struck for a full day, withholding their paid and unpaid labor across all sectors, with the most notable impacts felt in education, healthcare, as well as in the mostly unrecognized provision of care for children and the elderly. 8M marches have seen large-scale participation across the Iberian Peninsula since 1975, the year in which both Spain began its transition to democracy following thirty-six years of fascist dictatorship and, coincidentally, in which the United Nations formally recognized March 8th as International Women’s Day. However, the Huelga Feminista of 2018 took on new meaning as ecofeminist concerns more formally qualified the calls to action, making front and center the long-standing and inextricable links between the capitalist and heteropatriarchal energy models that have historically subjugated women (and invisibilized their labor) and that are responsible for the decimation of our biosphere. Across the country, women and allies mobilized to make clear that femicide and ecocide have a direct correlation: women are those who reproduce life (yet, their reproductive rights are continually managed and legislated within patriarchal systems of oppression); most of the world’s agricultural production is carried out by women (yet, capitalist agroindustrial systems continue to overtake local, traditional farming, leading to extraordinary rates of soil nutrient depletion and of starvation); and women’s provision of care is that which sustains life (yet women’s labor is devalued within the neoliberal myth of perpetual economic growth and the monetization of wealth, which prioritize the coffers of a few over the collective health of the planet and its vegetal and animal inhabitants).

Ecofeminism in Spain, therefore, is a crucial and growing field of thought and of political activism that in recent years has been gaining momentum for its extraordinary potential to inform and inspire transformative social and economic change that will improve global and local ecological health. As with the rebirth of democracy in Spain, ecofeminism began to develop in the 1970s following the coining of the term by French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne, for whom the disenfranchisement of women, people of color, and the poor is correlative to the degradation of the natural world as a result of patriarchal dominance.